Today’s talk with Peter Yu, sponsored by the Digital Media in Asia Project and Harvard Law School’s East Asia Legal Studies Program, will be webcast at 12:30. Please vistit the Berkman Center homepage for more information and for a link to the webcast. It’s in Real Audio format (unfortunately) so if you don’t have a Real Audio player you can download one here: www.real.com.
Celebrated Chinese film director Chen Kaige (Farewell My Concubine) has threatened to sue Hu Ge, a 31 year-old Shanghai audio engineer, with copyright infringement–because of a homemade spoof about steamed buns. Hu was so disappointed with Chen’s latest film, The Promise, that he put together The Steamed Bun Murder, a 20-minute parody of the film, and posted it on the internet. Hu’s parody has become an overnight sensation in China, and something of a cause c�l�bre.
From The Times:
[Hu's] satire, unprecedented in China’s carefully monitored media, has
attracted millions of viewers, almost certainly many more than paid to
see The Promise. The film has proved to be something of a box-office flop, although distributors say it has earned �15 million.
Chinese collapse in gales of laughter as they watch Mr Hu’s spoof. The Steamed Bun Murder
not only parodies the most expensive film made in China, but also pokes
fun at state television. He uses a poker-faced presenter and stuffy
communist terminology in his tongue-in-cheek report of the
investigation into the humble bun murder.
If Chen pursues a legal case it is unclear if Chinese courts would allow a parody fair-use defense. Such parodies are rarely produced or broadcast by the strictly controlled state-run traditional media, so these might be untested legal waters.
There is a developing trend of homemade spoofs gaining phenomenal popularity over the internet in China (e.g., the Back Dorm Boys, whose goofy dormroom webcam video of themselves performing Backstreet Boys tracks was such a sensation it landed them an advertising deal with Motorola). Clearly, Chinese consumers see the internet as a source of alternative content that’s in tune with the modern Chinese urban experience in a way that the conservative state-run media is not. Hu’s spoof is a salient example, taking direct shots at a state-run media perceived as stuffy.
This Thursday, March 2, we’re pleased to present a live and webcast event, co-hosted with the East Asian Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. Professor Peter Yu will present “Elegant Offenses, Digital Opium and the Sinicyberspace.” Lunchtime talks begin promptly at 12:30 p.m. This talk is open to the public, and is located at Harvard Law School, Pound Hall 106. You are invited to bring your lunch beginning at 12 noon to meet the guest speaker and others in EALS and the Digital Media in Asia Project. We’ll supply fruit, cookies, and beverages.
We will post a link to the webcast on this blog shortly before the event.
From Professor Yu:
About Peter Yu:
Peter K. Yu (余家明) is Associate Professor of Law and the founding director of the nationally-ranked Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program at Michigan State University College of Law. He holds appointments in the Asian Studies Center and the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University. He is also a research fellow of the Center for Studies of Intellectual Property Rights at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China and a member of the affiliated faculty of the Working Group on Property, Citizenship, and Social Entrepreneurism at Syracuse University College of Law. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Professor Yu is a leading expert in international intellectual property and communications law. He is the editor or coeditor of three books and currently is working on a book titled Paranoid Pirates and Schizophrenic Swashbucklers: Protecting Intellectual Property in Post-WTO China. Professor Yu has spoken at events organized by the ITU, UNCTAD, WIPO and the U.S. government and at leading research institutions from around the world. He is a frequent commentator in the national and international media, and his publications are available on his website at www.peteryu.com.
Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson led a thought-provoking session Wednesday night (2/8/06) about his vision–enticing but embryonic–of using technology, the Internet, and even soccer to connect what he calls the biggest of the big–China–with the smallest of the small–Jamaica. His love for Jamaica, and his track record of helping the people there and truly changing lives, gave the presentation an added richness, sincerity, and importance. He was looking for suggestions and ideas from the group as much as he was looking to present ideas himself. And it was a good group–about 25 people, many happy to engage in a discussion about how to further a unique vision that still needs the right spark.
Unfortunately we had some technical problems with the webcast (we’ll fix that before the next event in our Digital Media in Asia speaker series).
Click here for a recap of the session at the Berkman Center web site.
To participate in Nesson’s online dialog about a China-Jamaica connection, check out his wiki.
Legendary Harvard Law School professor and cyberlaw and evidence expert Charles Nesson will speak to the Digital Media in Asia Project on Wednesday, Feb. 8 from 5-7PM (US Eastern Standard Time) at Harvard Law School (Pound Hall rm. 107).
Professor Nesson will lead a discussion on how the internet, weblogs, and the media/entertainment/sports industries can be utilized to create international bridges between cultures. The focus will be on China and Jamaica. We will be joined by special guest Berkman Center for Internet & Society fellow Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief and China/weblog expert. Refreshments will be provided.
Click here to listen to a live webcast of the event beginning at 5:00PM (EST). (For an http stream, click here.)
Seeking to tap into China’s market of some 350 million mobile phone subscribers, Seattle’s Melodeo has formed a joint venture with Access China, a subsidiary of Access, a Japanese internet technology provider. The joint venture “will launch the first platform in China to deliver secure digital content through wireless operators and other mobile-service providers.” According to its website, Melodeo provides “an all-in-one mobile music system … to Mobile Operators. This system lets users shop for music on their mobile phone, download it to the mobile phone and listen to it anywhere or any time in high quality stereo.”
The enormous number of Chinese mobile phone users is no doubt enticing to companies like Melodeo. A fair number of pundits think mobile phone downloads is the killer app that will turn things around for the piracy-riddled music industry in China. Of course, in China the potential users of a wireless, for-pay music download service are probably a relatively small subset of the 350 million mobile phone users. Couple that with the fact that the price Chinese consumers are willing to pay for per-song downloads is something far lower than the 99-cent US price-point, and it might be a challenging business model to sustain. Of course, the biggest challenge to the music-over-mobile business model is unauthorized P2P file sharing, which is rampant in China, and threatens the future of any for-profit online (or mobile phone-based) music retail business model.
The following is an exclusive interview I had on 12/06/05 and 12/07/05 via e-mail with Mr. Jun Wu, President and CEO of R2G. R2G is a relatively new Chinese company that is in the forefront of piracy prevention in China. Most recently, R2G has through legal action successfully compelled major websites Baidu.com, the9.com, and 21cn.com to remove their links to unauthorized music content.
CHEN: How does R2G plan to reduce the impact of rogue BT
websites, rogue P2P file sharing software, and FTP servers that do not
distinguish between legal and illegal copies of songs?WU: We will track each individual BT or P2P site down to
make sure that they do not distribute content that had registered with us.
According to the new Internet copyright bill that was introduced by the Chinese
government earlier this year, once we have notified these sites with the list
of illegal content, they will have to delist these content immediately. Our
tracking software is developed in house, and specific to each individual site.
It will be difficult for me to go into details one by one in an email.CHEN: When a typical user is presented with a legit and
illegal venue, what will R2G offer to persuade him to pay more money for the
same song/movie? We’ve seen from the US that suing individuals for copyright
infringement alone isn’t an effective deterrent. Of course, offering a legal
venue will attract some users, but as long as a cheaper venue is available, how
does R2G plan to drastically convert users to legit methods?WU: Our strategy is to focus on the service provider, be it
a search engine or a P2P service provider， making sure that it will be
increasingly difficult for an average consumer to be able to find illegal
venues to download pirated content. We believe that if we are able to cut the
current piracy rate from 95% to 50% (a ten fold improvement), it is more than
significant enough to make a big impact on the overall market.CHEN: I understand that R2G has experienced success in
convincing large websites to de-list links to illegally distributed music. How
successful has R2G been in convincing smaller websites to become legitimate
distributors? What are the differences in strategy when dealing with smaller
websites, as opposed to larger sites?
WU: Even though we had not been focusing on the smaller sites very much,
generally we feel they are relatively easy to handle. Our experience so far had
been that the medium sized websites are the most difficult ones to deal with.
The logic is quite simple. In converting ones website from pirating to legit,
there is always this issue of timing. So these medium sized sites are always
afraid that they will loose traffic during the process of turning legit,
therefore loosing the possibility of ever competing against the big ones.CHEN: Regarding P2P file-sharing, how does R2G plan to track and curb P2P
file-sharing? Are there any estimated percentage breakdowns of where a typical
Chinese person gets his music, movies, and other digital entertainment? (Legal
physical copies, legal online downloads, illegal websites, illegal P2P, illegal
physical sales, etc) Does R2G have any plans to turn P2P into a profitable mode
of file distribution?WU: Yes, we are indeed working on the P2Ps as well. We hope to bring some good
news to the market around the Chinese New Year. The plan is to install a layer
of filtering function with our P2P partners so that R2G registered content may
not be pirated in amongst these P2P site/communities. The first batch of these
P2P sites all has a centralized server. We are working on ways to offer similar
functions for the Freenet like P2P community. We believe that once one
can control what can be distributed amongst a P2P network, then there are many
ways to turn this into a profitable business. However, I don’t have any info
regarding the distribution at hand. My estimate will be, most of the younger
generation download their music from the Internet either through a search
engine or a P2P site.CHEN: What demographics do the Chinese entertainment industry view as its
greatest asset and liability? What actions are entertainment companies taking
to maximize revenues from these assets and limit losses from the liabilities?WU: The young generation (15-35) is clearly the main market for entertainment
content (especially in the case of digital distribution). In a way, they are
both asset and liability. If the collective service offering is
acceptable to this segment, then there is enormous potential, otherwise it is
going to be an uphill battle.CHEN: How does R2G and the entertainment industry plan to
scale their business model to serve college students, who typically have less
expendable income?WU: Currently it is not on the top of our to-do list. Once
the overall piracy rate in the public network is reduced to a certain level we
will start addressing these niche market too.
An interesting news article about China’s digital media situation.
Some interesting snippets from the article:
“I would like to plant this challenge: by 2008, to have more
legal than illegal DVDs sold in China, to have more American
movies in Chinese theaters and to have more Chinese movies in
American theaters,” says Dan Glickman, CEO of the MPAA.“It is virtually impossible to find counterfeit Olympics
goods in China. Why? As one of the Chinese officials said, it
is because fakes dilute the value of the logo, the intellectual
property upon which the Chinese have invested to finance the
games,” he continues.
What are Chinese companies doing to protect their intellectual property online?
To supplement governmental enforcement efforts, private companies, like R2G, have formed to help protect their clients’ intellectual property. According to Jun Wu, CEO and founder of R2G, via an e-mail interview, their strategy is to “track each individual BT or P2P site down to make sure that they do not distribute [their clients’ copyrighted] content.” R2G will try to persuade these service providers to adopt a business model that compensates the copyright holders or else face lawsuits. The reason websites offer links to free media, Wu says, is mainly to attract traffic. Therefore, the hardest sites to convert are the medium sized ones because they are “always afraid that they will loose traffic during the process of turning legit, therefore loosing the possibility of ever competing against the big ones.”
Wu’s philosophy is that as R2G converts rogue websites to legitimate distributors: “It will be increasingly difficult for an average consumer to be able to find illegal venues to download pirated content,” and thus, users will switch over to legal sources. Of course, R2G is hoping that they can convert existing websites faster than new ones appear. R2G plans to focus on tracking public sites first, leaving potent niches like university networks and private FTP servers unexamined for the moment.
R2G has generally received favorable court opinions when suing websites for copyright infringement. They successfully forced China’s most popular MP3 search engine, Baidu.com, to remove thousands of links after filing an infringement lawsuit against the website. Shortly following the Baidu case, R2G sued similar websites, the9.com and 21cn.com, both of whom soon removed their links to pirated content.
At least one blogger and a group of English football fans seem to think that the answer is China. A Chinese company called PPLive (English site) appears to have beat AOL and BBC, both of whom are still trial-testing their Kontiki-powered
P2P TV Streaming software, to the commercial release of a service that
provides Web users with live streaming TV through P2P technology.
P2P streaming is a breakthrough because it allows content providers to
broadcast video to a potentially limitless audience without the need to
pay for server space or bandwidth. As I understand it, PPLive’s
technology is similar to Bittorrent
in that it allows a single source to quickly spread data to a large
number of recipients by turning downloaders into sources for other
downloaders.
The developers of Sopcast, another
P2P streaming software, claim that their product allows any individual
to broadcast his own video. Though I have not tried this myself, the
implication is that a generous soul could broadcast his paid cable
connection, his DVD collection, or his collection of digital video
files to the world at no charge to himself or his audience.
I would appreciate comments on the following questions:
How will media companies respond? Is this new threat to copyright
holders easily defeated by technological measures or international IP
treaties?
How do PPLive and Sopcast technology compare to Kontiki’s commercial product in terms of video quality and network efficiency?
If copyright holders successfully attack PPLive, will PPLive still have
a viable business model? Are PPLive and Kontiki competitors, or are
their software packages capable of completely different applications?
